Name
AMICUS: Automated motif discovery in cultural heritage and scientific communication texts
Description
The AMICUS network devotes itself to building a research commity on the topic of computational models of motifs in cultural heritage text and in scientific communication. We chart available corpora such as annotated folk tale collections, identify directions of research, and organize events around these topics. In folk tale research the notion of motif is quite central, as it is a means to explain certain cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, diachronic constancies in folk tales. Motifs are complex higher-level patterns that recur in a non-accidental way; they contribute crucially to the function of the story (Propp, 1928), and have evolved over time, gaining cultural significance along a long path of oral and written transmission and canonization. Cultural heritage objects can often be characterized by the motifs they contain, and a considerable amount of research on these objects takes into account this important aspect. Their role in document classification and retrieval is largely unexplored, however. The AMICUS network sets out to test a possible way to solve this problem, starting with the identification of Proppian functions in folk tale corpora and adapting the solution to the identification of tale motifs or their functional equivalents. AMICUS has devoted its first project year to listing the corpora, tools, methods and contacts available to address the above problem. Collaboration in the AMICUS research network takes place in two ways, by regular exchange through virtual communication platforms, and by reporting and discussing our findings at a series of three workshops, structured according to major themes. Workshop I (October 21, 2010, Vienna, Austria) provided an international overview of relevant methods in text analytics and semantic annotation; Workshop II (2011) will address test results by specific tools for text analytics; Workshop III (2012) will focus on the interplay between community-specific user perception of content-bearing elements.
ParentProject
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Hyperlinks
Project Data
Identifiers
NARCIS_OND: OND1340076
Institutes involved

NWO Council for the Humanities,
Netherlands, The Hague (Financier)
NARCIS_ORG: ORG1235107

Center for Cognition and Communication,
Netherlands, Tilburg (Secretariat)
NARCIS_ORG: ORG1242927

Persons involved

Prof.dr. A.P.J. van den Bosch (Project leader)
NARCIS_PRS: PRS1274275
DAI: DAI074787926

Start Date
2009-09-01
End Date
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PhD Project
No
PhD Students involved
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NWO Disciplines
Linguistics
Research Activities
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Research Techniques
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Research Objects
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